Performances of the sacred in late medieval and early modern England / edited by Susanne Rupp and Tobias Doring.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Rupp, Susanne, 1967-

Döring, Tobias.

Series:

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 86.

Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden ; 86

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Holy, The.

Sacred space--England.

Sacred space.

England--Religion.

England.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (207 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life - the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking - may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors - such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan - as well as less canonical examples - the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets - the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.

Contents:

Tobias DÖRING: Introduction

Paul STROHM: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture

Andrew James JOHNSTON: The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Thomas HEALY: Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric

Andreas HÖFELE: Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe's Actes and Monuments

Andrew HADFIELD: James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings

Verena OLEJNICZAK LOBSIEN: "Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind": Sidney's Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection

Susanne RUPP: Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology

Richard WILSON: Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries

Ina SCHABERT: The Lady's Supper: Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist

Irmgard MAASSEN: Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet

Sabine SCHÜLTING: Tobacco-Sacred and Profane

Notes on Contributors.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

94-012-0207-9

1-4175-9117-X

OCLC:

60157717

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789401202077 DOI